WarioWare, Inc. is one of the most important games of all time

Nintendo’s back catalog is so absurdly rich that, when launching the new Game Boy and Game Boy Advance collections on Nintendo Switch Online, it can afford to offer a mix of cult curios, major and minor entries in popular series, and a hall-of-famer like Game Boy TetrisWhile still preserving enough for future needs, you can save a lot. Even for this company, though, there’s nothing to touch the prophetic influence and punk-rock abandon of one of Nintendo’s most daring designs ever: Mega Microgames from WarioWare, Inc.

It’s not that Nintendo invented the idea of an anarchic minigame compilation with this 2003 GBA release, which went on to spawn a minor series and cult obsession. Konami’s similarly surreal and silly Bishi Bashi games, featuring competitive minigames like “Jump for the Meat,” first appeared in the arcades in the late 1990s. But WarioWareThe idea was taken to an aesthetic and formal extreme. Depending on how you look at it, this either reduced the whole concept to its essence or destroyed it entirely.

The idea is simple: survive a gauntlet of “microgames” that speed up as you progress. What makes it extraordinary is that Nintendo’s developers — WarioWare, Inc. was made by a small team within Nintendo’s in-house R&D1 department — really weren’t kidding when they deployed the term “micro.” The games are no more than three or four seconds long, and their rules are boiled down to a single verb: Dodge! Shoot! Jump! Land! Pinch! Enter! Detonate! Sniff!In fractions of seconds, you can read the instructions and see the visuals and figure out what input is required. They become familiar over time. However, each game has a variety of speeds, lengths, timings, and other variations that will keep you busy.

There’s a radical compression of the usual conversation between player and game here that’s quite thrilling to experience: a synaptic snap that happens in the space between the word, the visuals, and the insistent tick-tock soundtrack. WarioWareThis reduces the time it takes to experience, learn, and master a new gaming game. A combination of intuition and patterns from years of gaming enables the player to act on instinct.

A photo of a white cat’s face with the word “Sleep!” written over it

Photos of vegetables, cut in half and mismatched. Over the top is the word “Potato!”

A screenshot from NES Metroid, with Samus facing the Mother Brain. Over the top is superimposed the word “Fire!”

A pretty anime lady with white hair has a huge droplet dangling from her nose. In the background is a lighthouse. Over the top a word reads “Sniff!”

This concept could be matched with a minimalist, austere visual style. But Nintendo is pushing the opposite direction. WarioWare, Inc.It is intentionally messy, ugly and inconsistent to view: A postmodern mess of wireframes and silhouettes, unfinished programmers art, stock photos and wild contrasting illustration styles. The game laughs in the face of Nintendo’s usual perfectionism, scrawling game ideas like graffiti over so much digital brick, and sampling some of the company’s own hits, from Duck HuntTo Legend of ZeldaThey are like loops on a beat. Some of the ideas — which the designers jotted down on individual Post-it Notes — are pretty juvenile, like the anime lady sniffing up a long, dangling string of snot. There’s even a faux-knockoff fighting game in which a giant, muscled Mario and a Bowser who looks like a depressed kaiju face off. There is no such thing as sacred.

Wario, as Mario’s selfish, lazy, and incompetent obverse, is a perfect mascot for all this tossed-off anarchy. It is all about the idea of WarioWare is that he has decided to get into game development as a get-rich-quick scheme, and you’re playing the half-assed products that he and his oddball friends have come up with. Each suite of microgames is framed by a weird story starring Wario’s buddies, like Jimmy, the flip-phone-toting disco king, or Dribble and Spitz, the cat-and-dog cabbies, and these cutscenes often pay off with total non sequiturs. (Hey, it turns out Dribble’s fare was a mer-boy!) All of this is absurd. But the beat continues, as evidenced by the blasting decibel meters or windshield wipers.

Amazing things about WarioWare — improbable, but completely necessary — is that it is as perfect as it is wild. The jokes land with the same metronomic precision as the player returns a tennis rally or extends Wario’s hand to catch a beer sliding along the bar. It is addictive, relentless and perfectly timed. As gaming’s 3D era hit its stride and games started to snowball in complexity, this brilliant, contrarian work decided to pull them apart instead. You can see Nintendo’s back-to-basics casual campaign with the Wii and DS foreshadowed here, as well as the bite-size, one-tap ethos of the coming smartphone revolution. WarioWare, Inc. predicts, parodies, and surpasses these trends without breaking its stride — and gives everything self-important and overdetermined about video games a gloriously life-affirming middle finger.